


Equal Rites

by myrmidryad



Series: RIP Roswell [3]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Death, Family Secrets, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Sibling Bonding, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:14:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27318322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrmidryad/pseuds/myrmidryad
Summary: When Kyle finds a key in his dad's old things, he's not expecting it to lead to a secret bunker under his old hunting cabin, a sister he never knew existed, a legacy of magic in his own family, and the possibility that Jim's death might not have been from such natural causes as he thought.
Relationships: Alex Manes & Kyle Valenti, Jim Valenti & Kyle Valenti, Rosa Ortecho & Kyle Valenti
Series: RIP Roswell [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1990846
Comments: 13
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [RIP Roswell](https://riproswell.tumblr.com/post/627177290151903232/rest-in-peace-roswell-a-halloween-rnm-event) day 3: death, afterlife, hauntings, and the paranormal. Did I pinch the title from the Terry Pratchett book because it was sitting on the counter in front of me and it just seemed appropriate? Maybe so.
> 
> This is based on one of [suzteel's](https://suzteel.tumblr.com) amazing creations for last year's RIP Roswell, which leapt into my brain last month and stayed because it's such a cool concept. [Behold the gifset](https://myrmidryad.tumblr.com/post/628640526681456640), which I kept open in a tab constantly while I wrote this.

The Valentis had never been a magical family. Some people had spice in their blood, crackling out of them and down through the generations of their bloodlines. Some people took to it out of nowhere, just touched for no reason, an ability for harnessing magic and casting spells popping up like a bad penny. Or a blessed penny, depending on your point of view.

Kyle’s attitude to it had softened from hostility to concealed disdain, he still didn’t like or understand it.

His parents had always been with him on that, he’d thought. His mom certainly was – Michelle had no patience for magic, and thought people who cast spells instead of finding practical solutions to their problems were fools. Jim had always said that magic was far more trouble than it was worth, and since it wasn’t all that strong anyway, a waste of time to boot.

So when Kyle had found a key in a box of his dad’s old things after moving back to Roswell, finally securing a place in the local hospital there to be closer to his mom, he hadn’t recognised the symbol on the leather keyring as magical. He didn’t know anything about magic. Why would he? 

He’d only recognised it as the same symbol as on the keyring from his dad’s old hunting cabin, about forty minutes outside town limits. And that had made him realise that he didn’t actually know what had happened to it after Jim had died.

These days, he took any excuse to go and see his mom. He kind of enjoyed going into the station to see her the way he’d gone in to see his dad sometimes as a kid. He and Michelle both liked the fact that she’d been elected Sheriff, taking the title back for a Valenti.

“The cabin?” Michelle raised her eyebrows when Kyle asked about it, the coffee he’d brought her sitting on the desk between them. “What brought this on?”

“I just remembered it,” Kyle shrugged. “You know he used to take me out there when I was a kid. And I realised I didn’t know what happened to it after he died.”

Michelle nodded slowly, unsmiling. “It’s still there, far as I know. He actually left it to Alex Manes.”

Kyle blinked, feeling the weight of Michelle’s gaze on him as she assessed his reaction. “Does Alex know?”

“Far as I know.” Michelle shrugged a shoulder. “I haven’t asked him. Haven’t seen him much since he came back to Roswell. Have you?”

“Not at all.” Kyle had thought they might see each other at the Wild Pony, since Maria DeLuca had been one of Alex’s best friends in high school, but so far he hadn’t seen Alex once. Which actually meant that the last time they’d seen each other had probably been graduation, nearly ten years ago. “Huh.”

Michelle raised an eyebrow. “Huh?”

God, there really was nothing like having a cop for a parent. Kyle gave her an exasperated look and stood up. “I guess I’ll try and track him down then. Thanks, Mama.”

“You’d better be respectful,” she warned him. “He’s a Captain, these days.”

“No kidding.” He hadn’t known that, and he didn’t know enough about the military to know whether that meant Alex was close to outranking his father or not. “Well, I’ll mind my manners.”

Michelle got up to kiss him goodbye, and watched him as he left. 

Kyle considered the problem of how to talk to Alex as he prepared for his next shift. His best bet would be to talk to Maria, he decided. The only other person still in town who’d been Alex’s friend in high school was Rosa, and she’d never liked Kyle.

“Weird question,” he said the next night he actually had free to go to the bar, timing it so it was Maria serving him.

“Only if you buy something,” Maria said sweetly, and he yanked his wallet out.

“Oh yeah – I need a round of five, actually, so.”

“For that, you can get one weird answer.” Maria grabbed glasses and began to pour. “Shoot.”

“Are you still in contact with Alex Manes?”

She snorted. “Is that weird? Duh, he’s my best friend, obviously I’m still in contact with Alex.” 

“I…don’t suppose you’d be willing to give me his number?”

“Not a chance in hell,” she smiled, not looking up from the next pint she was pulling. “But you can give me yours and I’ll pass it on.”

“I guess that’s as good as I’ll get. The guy doesn’t even have Facebook.”

Maria shot him a look he couldn’t quite read, but she finished pouring his drinks and slipped her own phone out of her jeans pocket. “Okay, what’s your number, Valenti?” 

Kyle took the drinks back to the table he was sharing with a few of his friends from Roswell General and sighed as they immediately began ribbing him about flirting with the barkeeper. 

Kyle didn’t have to wait long before Alex texted him. Two days after he’d given his number to Maria, he got a message from an unknown number.

**From: Unknown [17:14]**  
Maria said you wanted to talk to me?

Only one person that could be from. It was almost seven now, and Kyle had been thinking about getting a run in before maybe going for a drink, but this took priority. 

**To: Unknown [18:48]**  
Alex?

**From: Unknown [18:48]**  
Obviously

**To: Alex Manes [18:49]**  
Yeah, I wanted to know if you were free to meet up. I know you’re back in town now.

There was a long gap, and Kyle checked his cupboards while he waited, wondering if he could go another day without shopping. He was pretty much down to protein shakes and cereal bars now, but if he got food at the Pony, that would take care of dinner for tonight.

**From: Alex Manes [19:07]**  
What for?

It was Kyle’s turn to think about how to reply. Because suddenly, asking about the cabin didn’t seem like a good enough reason, especially when he’d been such an asshole to Alex in high school. He didn’t want Alex to think he was pissed or resentful about Jim leaving him the cabin. He’d been there about as often as Kyle had, after all. 

So was there anything else he wanted to say to Alex?

What would his dad do? What would Jim want him to do?

Jim had been disappointed when he’d ‘grown apart’ from Alex in the last year of middle school, cutting Alex loose like so much dead weight in his quest not to get dragged down with him. It hadn’t been calculated, exactly. Kyle had just seen the way the wind was blowing, and he hadn’t wanted to be in the same boat as Alex going forward. He’d wanted to have a good time in high school; he’d wanted girls to like him, wanted other boys to think he was cool. Alex being his best friend just hadn’t been compatible with that.

Jim would have wanted them to mend those fences. If Kyle was honest with himself, which he really tried to be these days, it was on his side that the fence needed mending. In practice, that meant an apology at the very least, and action on his part if Alex was open to it. Which he might well not be, and Kyle could hardly blame him. The guy was a Captain in the Air Force now, for God’s sake. He didn’t need his childhood bestie cosying up to him.

Kyle took a quick detour to check Air Force ranks. He knew Alex’s dad was a Master Sergeant, or maybe a Chief Master Sergeant, but it turned out that Alex outranked him either way, as an officer. He had to be happy about that, surely, getting one up on his dad? It wasn’t the sort of thing Kyle could ask yet, but maybe at some point, if Alex was interested in renewing their old friendship.

He dithered for a while over the wording of his reply, and felt in the end that he’d done a fairly mediocre job.

**To: Alex Manes [19:32]**  
A couple of things. Maybe reconnect, and talk about the cabin? I didn’t know my dad left it to you till today.

**From: Alex Manes [19:33]**  
I’ve got a day off Wednesday.

Kyle sighed.

**To: Alex Manes [19:34]**  
I could do Sunday? Or tonight if you’re free.

**From: Alex Manes [19:35]**  
Sunday works. You remember where the cabin is, I’ll be in after 10.

Brusque, but clear. Kyle texted back a thumbs-up emoji and went to get changed for a run. He definitely needed to exhaust himself a little after that exchange.

Sunday at 10:30 on the dot saw Kyle pulling up to the cabin, taking note of the ugly but practical station wagon outside. The cabin looked exactly the same as he remembered, and as he climbed the old porch steps, Alex opened the door and stepped out. He didn’t look the same. He looked taller, broader, and generally harder. He wasn’t in fatigues or anything, but Kyle could imagine this man in uniform with a gun over his shoulder.

“Hi,” he said, feeling very young and stupid all of a sudden. The feeling increased when Alex lifted one eyebrow.

“Hi.”

“How are you?” Kyle asked, also stupidly.

Alex’s eyebrow stayed up. “Oh, y’know. Saw some different deserts, made new friends, left half a leg behind. Win some, lose some.”

Kyle had heard about that through the grape vine, and somehow wasn’t surprised to hear Alex mention it so casually. Defensively, almost. Getting it out in the open so Kyle wouldn’t tiptoe around it or be able to use it against him.

“I heard,” he said. “How’re you doing with it?”

Alex blinked, then narrowed his eyes. “What’s it to you?”

“Professional interest?” Kyle offered. 

“Hm. What did you actually want, Kyle?”

“A couple things.” Kyle pulled the key he’d found in his dad’s stuff out of his back pocket and stepped up onto the porch properly to hand it to Alex. “This is the first, kinda. It’s what made me reach out to you, anyway.”

“What is it?” Alex frowned, turning the keyring over in his hand.

“I mean…” Kyle tried a smile, but Alex gave him a flat look that said that they weren’t even close to being friendly enough to make jokes. “I found it in a box of my dad’s old stuff,” he said. “I wasn’t in Roswell when my mom was packing up his things, I just kinda stumbled across it. And the keyring, y’know.”

“It’s the same as mine for the cabin,” Alex nodded. “Key’s too small for the door though.”

Kyle took a breath. “You mind if I come in and take a look around, see if anything fits it? I promise I won’t be long.”

Alex weighed it up for a few long seconds, then handed the key back to him. “Okay. I put everything that reminded me of the ‘good old days’ in the closet, so you can go through that if you want. Come on.” He turned to go inside, and Kyle followed, looking around with wide eyes.

“God, I haven’t been here since…high school, probably. It all looks exactly the same. Do you live here?” he asked hesitantly.

Alex snorted. “No, I’ve got a place in town. It was okay to stay in when I first got assigned here,” he added, in a slightly gentler tone. “But it’s not exactly accessible. And it’s tiny. And cold.”

“Yeah, I remember.” Kyle laughed a little, turning around to take it all in. “God. You remember that time your dad made us do survival training out here?”

“Mm, your dad was away for the night, so mine invented a brand-new form of kiddie torture.” Alex’s lip curled. “Just another great example of his parenting skills.”

“Hey, we sneaked our way back in, didn’t we?” Kyle said, trying another smile. “We made a pretty good team.”

“Oh sure.” Alex raised that eyebrow again, lethal sarcasm with only a twitch of a muscle. “We were a great team, till you grew one chest hair and instantly became a nightmare of a bully.”

Okay then. Well, Alex had never been one to hold back when he was pissed. When they were kids, Kyle remembered snapping back just as hard, the two of them getting into major fights a few times. It had never lasted. 

“That’s fair,” he said, accidentally slipping into what he thought of as his doctor voice. Calm and measured, never confrontational, but occasionally firm. Always in control, because no one trusted a doctor who sounded like they didn’t know what they were doing. He swallowed and tried to shake it off. “I don’t know why I did that.”

Alex scoffed. “Seriously? You acted like that because I was gay. And you didn’t want anyone else to think you were gay too, just because you were friends with me.”

Kyle swallowed again and nodded. “You’re right.” He could see from Alex’s blink that he hadn’t expected that, which didn’t make him feel too great. “I should never have cut you out of my life like that. I was –” A dumb kid, he almost said, and switched it out for, “– wrong, I was a bad friend.” No excuses, he’d decided on that after his dad had died.

Both of Alex’s eyebrows went up at that, but he still sounded unimpressed when he spoke. “Yeah, you were.”

Kyle nodded. “That was the second thing, actually. I wanted to apologise for that.”

“For being a dick in high school?”

“Yeah. Like, to you in particular. Y’know, we were best friends.” Kyle shook his head. “I should’ve stuck with you.”

“Yeah. You should’ve.” Alex frowned, and turned away. “I don’t think I ever found anything in here that’s got a lock that might match that key.”

“You mind me going through it anyway?”

“No.”

If Alex had left, Kyle definitely would have succumbed to the nostalgia, but he stayed and they went through the closet (which was actually a cupboard) in about ten minutes. “Shit.” Kyle sighed. “Was there anything else?”

Alex shook his head. “I don’t think so. Maybe the coffee table? I didn’t exactly go through those drawers with a fine-tooth comb.”

The first drawer Kyle tried stuck, and he got down on his knees and tried to wiggle it out, and when that failed, gave it a hard yank. At that point of course, the whole drawer came out, sending Kyle toppling backwards.

“Nice one,” Alex said dryly, and Kyle rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, yeah. Hey.” He knelt up again, eyes caught by something he could see under the table now the drawer was out. “There’s something under there.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Help me move this?” He stood up, and between them they heaved the table sideways to reveal an honest-to-God hatch in the floor. “What the hell,” Kyle muttered, and looked across it at Alex. “Did you know this was here?”

“No, dude!” Alex sounded so much like his old self that Kyle almost smiled. He went down on one knee and heaved at the hatch, pausing when Alex made frantic motions. “Whoa, what’re you doing?”

“Opening it?” Kyle looked up at him, eyebrows raised. “I mean, what’s the worst that could be down there?”

Alex gave him an incredulous look. “Uh, literal skeletons?”

“Oh come on.” Kyle honestly felt like they were twelve again, falling into their old roles, egging each other on. “I’ll even go first.”

Alex narrowed his eyes, and Kyle knew he knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew Alex was going to fall for it anyway, because he always did.

Alex went down the ladder first, of course, because he had to prove a point now. Kyle hurried after him, and they both stared in silence for a solid three seconds before Alex cleared his throat. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.”

Kyle wouldn’t have said he’d have preferred skeletons exactly, but somehow it would’ve been less surprising.

The bunker was small, claustrophobic, badly lit, and very clearly a demesne. That was an official designation, Kyle had heard from a friend at college. A place used as a focus and preparation space for the magical arts was a demesne. He remembered the first time he’d said it out loud he’d pronounced it as duh-mez-nee, not realising that all the times he’d heard his people talk about domains, it was actually demesnes. Or it was when it was magic-related, anyway.

This looked like a demesne out of a damn picture book. There was a big bench against the opposite wall, and a smaller one down the right side. The left and right walls had lots of shelves, and they were all jammed full of books, jars, bottles, and boxes. There were more books and loose papers on the workbenches, and a little camping stove with a pot on it. All it needed were some herbs hanging up to dry from the ceiling, and it would be so on the nose Kyle would have suspected it was a secret film set or something.

“You seriously didn’t know this was here?” he asked, hushed.

“Do you think I would’ve kept it quiet if I’d known?” Alex asked, just as transfixed by the scene as him. 

“You didn’t sense it at all?”

“I’m a codebreaker.” Alex shook his head and glanced at him. “I don’t work with anything like this. Just because I hung out with Maria it doesn’t mean I’ve got the touch myself. It’s not just me though, right? Jim never…”

“No!” Kyle was embarrassed by his own vehemence. He was supposed to be past stupid prejudices like that these days. “He never said anything. Or did anything. There’s no way my mom knew, she’d’ve said something by now.”

Alex took a step forward into the room, looking around. “This is insane. Do you know anything about magic?”

“Nothing. Which is the same amount as I thought my dad knew, but apparently not.” Kyle inched his way further into the room. “I mean…what the hell. He always said it was more trouble than it was worth!”

“Maybe he knew from experience,” Alex murmured. “How long did he have this cabin for?”

“No idea. Before I was born, for sure. I don’t think it was my grandpa’s, but…oh, you’ve got the deeds, right? There’d be an ownership record.”

“Yeah, they’re not here though.” Alex tilted his head to read something on the big workbench. “They’re at my place. I can’t believe all this stuff has been here this whole time, and he never told anyone.”

“But why? This looks…weird,” Kyle said, looking around again. “But it’s not illegal or anything.”

“Maybe embarrassing for a sheriff though,” Alex pointed out.

“Yeah, maybe.” Kyle sighed and stepped closer to the end bench to examine its contents. The pot on the burner was empty and dirty, and there was a jar of his dad’s brand of instant coffee behind it that he hadn’t seen. Seeing it brought on a rush of grief that was familiar by now, but no less painful for that. 

“Hey.” Alex tapped his arm. “Look.”

He was looking at something under the bench, and Kyle stepped back to see what he was pointing at. There was a battered old chest tucked against the wall with a padlock locking it shut, and Kyle slipped his hand into his pocket to pull out the key.

“We could get a curse breaker if you want,” Alex offered, but Kyle shook his head.

“I think it’ll be okay. I’ve got the key, right?” He knelt down and pulled the chest out from under the bench, taking note of the slower way Alex knelt down next to him. 

“Maybe.” Alex didn’t sound too happy, but he wasn’t stopping him. Kyle figured he’d already touched the chest now anyway, so if he was cursed, he was cursed. He curled his hand around the padlock and slid the key into it – a perfect fit – and turned it so the padlock popped open.

He couldn’t help glancing at Alex before pushing it open. How many times had they played treasure-finding games, imagining digging up a chest just like this one?

After finding a literal demesne under his dad’s cabin, Kyle had been expecting something more magical. He hadn’t been expecting a box full of baby stuff. There were blankets, a teddy bear, and even a photo that he reached for right away. His dad’s head wasn’t in shot, which made no difference since he was in his uniform, name badge on full display. 

Alex was silent as Kyle stared at the photo, which a distant part of him appreciated. The baby was a girl, if the pink blanket she was wrapped in was any indication. There was a stylised _R_ embroidered on it, next to an embroidered rose. She looked young, practically a newborn, and Kyle took a deep breath before turning the photo over.

The back was blank.

Kyle looked at the front again, examining it closer. The star on his dad’s chest wasn’t a sheriff’s badge, which meant this photo had to have been taken before Kyle was five or so. There was nothing else in the photo visible beyond the stretch of his dad’s shoulders and chest, and the baby.

“He had a daughter,” Kyle said at last, pointlessly. He was sure Alex had come to the same conclusion on his own.

“You have a sister,” Alex said, and the use of the present tense made it all feel much more real.

Kyle took a deep breath and put the photograph back in the chest. “I knew he cheated on my mom,” he said, not really meaning to. “I…she used to say his heart was too big.” He’d hated that phrase. Still kinda hated it, if he was honest with himself. “I didn’t know he had another _kid_.”

“Do you think your mom knows?” Alex asked quietly, and Kyle shook his head.

“I don’t know. I wanna say no, but she doesn’t like raking up mud, y’know? Past oughta stay in the past, that’s her philosophy.” That said, he couldn’t imagine his mom not being off the wall enraged about his dad getting another woman pregnant. If anything could push his more-conservative-than-she-liked-to-admit mother to a divorce, that would be it. “Jesus.” Kyle pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is a lot.”

“Yeah.”

“He must’ve been involved,” Kyle muttered, trying to get his mind back into gear. “In her upbringing, I mean. He hated people who treated their kids wrong, anyone who treated kids wrong. I just…how could he do this?” An unfamiliar anger began to take root inside him, growing strong and ugly. “He was definitely married to my mom when this picture was taken. What the hell was he doing?”

“Hey.” Alex gave him a reproving sort of look. “Jim was a good guy. Whatever happened, whatever he did, he wasn’t a bad person.”

“You think if he’d been a decent father to this kid, I wouldn’t know about it?” Kyle asked, gesturing to the photo. “You can’t keep a kid a secret like that and treat them right at the same time. Did she even know who her father was? Even if he was helping monetarily, he wasn’t taking this kid out for ice-cream or having dinner with her every night. A good father does those things.”

“Yeah, mine did,” Alex said coolly, and Kyle’s breath caught. “He took us out for ice-cream and paintball, he sat down to dinner with us every night he could. And he beat the crap out of me in front of my brothers about once a week to remind us who was in charge. A good father isn’t just day trips and dinners. Jim tried to help any kid he knew was in trouble, and he even tried to help me, even though he knew he’d be going up against my dad to do it. He wasn’t a bad person, Kyle.”

Kyle looked around the bunker, deflated. “He obviously had his secrets though.”

“Everyone does.” Alex stood up slowly. “I’m gonna go back upstairs. Shout if you need anything.”

“Thanks.”

Without an observer, Kyle shifted to sit on the floor more comfortably and rifled through the contents of the chest, but it didn’t yield anything else of use. No other clues hidden between the folds of the baby blankets, nothing obviously stitched inside the teddy bear. It was a chest of mementos of a baby girl, with a used teething ring the most recent thing in there. Perhaps the mother had left Roswell, or for some reason had decided that she didn’t want to give any more of her daughter’s things to her father.

Kyle closed the chest, and stood up to go over to the workbench again to go through the papers and notebooks, shuffling them into manageable piles and tidying things up. Pens, pencils, two different rulers, a few packets of salt and sugar, a couple of spoons, a fork, three knives (two of them very sharp cutting knives), a hair tie, and a chipped mug went to the left with the burner and pot, papers and books to the right. 

Jim had always kept his hair short, so Kyle had no idea where the hair tie had come from. It was plain brown, nothing identifiable about it at all.

Kyle flipped through some of the loose, crumpled papers on the right of the bench, heart sinking when he couldn’t read them. They were in some kind of code, symbols instead of letters and diagrams that Kyle didn’t understand. He found one that had a few notes in English, but they still didn’t make sense. The main drawing was of a circle divided into four quarters, with symbols in two and shading in two. There was a sketch of a plant that was maybe supposed to be some kind of fruit next to it, and what was maybe supposed to be a crescent moon on the other side. 

All around were scribbles in Jim’s heavily slanted handwriting, interspersed with more lines of code symbols. _How to find that which carries lines to the nexus?_ read one note. _Perhaps pod from gestation?_ was next to an arrow pointing to the badly drawn fruit. 

It probably made sense in context, but Kyle didn’t have any of that context, and more than half of all the writing was in code he couldn’t read and had no idea how to decipher.

Hadn’t Alex just said he was a codebreaker though?

Kyle put that idea in his back pocket. He didn’t want to push what was still very fragile.

The notebooks were mostly in code too. There was the occasional line of English, but it was still as incomprehensible to Kyle as the diagram notes had been. There were dates though, and Kyle felt a horrible pang go through him when he saw that the final entry was dated just a couple of weeks before the brain cancer diagnosis had been made.

There were more notebooks on the shelves, and Kyle took them all off and piled them on the bench, arranging them in date order. They went back to 1982, when Jim would have been 22, six years younger than Kyle was now. They were a mix of A4 and A5, mostly spiral-bound, all cheap and battered. Kyle was reminded of his own lab books, the covers getting more dirty and stained as he used them and carted them around from class to class.

He tried to skim the first notebook’s English parts, and found it impossible. This was his father, his father’s painfully familiar handwriting, only a little changed over time, and he was making no sense at all, comprehension just out of Kyle’s reach. His father as a young man, his mind suddenly open under Kyle’s eyes, but speaking in a language he couldn’t understand.

The grief would hit him hard later, but for now Kyle boxed it away. He was about to start looking at the other books on the shelves when Alex came back down with two bags. “I figured you might wanna take some of this stuff away with you,” he said.

“Yeah.” Kyle cleared his throat. “Yeah, thanks. Uh, could I come back too? Some of this is, I mean – it’ll take time to clean it out.”

“Sure.” Alex handed him a bag. “Just let me know when you’re coming.”

Kyle didn’t want to suggest he copy a key. The cabin was Alex’s, even if there was a secret demesne underneath it that hadn’t been in the floorplan.

They filled up the bags, and Alex produced rope from somewhere to heave the chest with the baby stuff up the ladder too. It barely fit through the hatch, but they got it out, and Alex carried it to Kyle’s car while Kyle took the bags.

“Thanks for letting me come, man,” he said when everything was in his trunk. “If you ever wanna get a beer sometime, I’m around.”

Alex narrowed his eyes. “I don’t get out much these days.”

“Well, if you change your mind, you’ve got my number.” Kyle didn’t want to press the issue, so he left. He was keen to get back to his dad’s notebooks anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

The problem was, he discovered pretty quickly, that he couldn’t decipher any of Jim’s writing. Even in English, it made absolutely no sense. He went back a couple of days later and got all of the other books from the cabin, and chickened out again when it came to asking Alex for his help in decoding the notebooks. He didn’t want Alex to think he was just using him.

The books were an interesting collection. There were a couple of very old hardbacks, their covers threadbare and their pages mottled in places with damp, but after that the oldest were from the fifties, and most were actually from the nineties.

They had titles like _Magister Officiorum_ , and _The Long-Hidden Friend_ , and _Psychic Self-Defence: A Study in Occult Pathology and Criminality_. Some looked like they’d only been read once or twice, if at all, but others were heavily dog-eared, and a few were annotated with Jim’s notes. Mostly in English, thank God.

The notes weren’t exactly informative though. It was mostly stuff like ‘must try this’ or ‘disproved’ or ‘tried it, didn’t work as advertised’.

Kyle was an expert at skimming a text to get the gist of it, and he read fast too. He figured out quickly which books were too advanced for him and which would make more sense to him as a beginner. He supplemented the books with the internet, staying up late and skipping his usual jogs to sit at his kitchen counter with his laptop and books spread out around him instead, like he was studying.

He felt like he was studying. And he felt good about it too; driven and fired up. At the same time though, he wished he could actually talk to his dad about it instead of struggling through his books without any guidance, trying to make sense of the annotations he made in the margins. 

It was a pattern, he realised, reading one of the most-dogeared books in his dad’s collection ( _Ancestral Veneration in Practice_ ). His dad had drawn a patchy family tree on a scrap of paper and used it as a bookmark, and included dates of birth and death for each relation.

Kyle and the mysterious _R_ were included underneath Jim’s name, and above Jim were Thomas and Maria Valenti. It being a Valenti-focused tree, the branch only focused on them, so above Jim was Hector and Elena Valenti. Above them, Fernando Valenti, no wife. Above that, question marks. Jim was apparently the first Valenti in all those generations to have more than one child, and for that additional child to be a daughter.

None of the Valenti men had lived to see their grandchildren.

Later in the book, Jim had heavily annotated a section about how to approach ancestors who had different practices or moral alignments. He’d scribbled his father’s and grandfather’s names, and left a long, cramped note about the difficulties of evolving moralities over time. It was a tantalising glimpse into his thoughts, and a past that Kyle had barely been aware of.

He wished more than ever that he could have actually talked about this with his dad. It was so unfair that he’d died before Kyle could talk to him about good and bad actions, about faith, about trying to be a good person in a world where it was impossible to be truly good all the time. About difficult decisions, and family, and duty, and trying to help rather than harm in a position of authority. 

Death was a cruel thief. Someone – Kyle couldn’t remember who – had said that at Jim’s funeral, and whoever they were, they were right. Jim had only been fifty-three when he’d died. Thomas had been fifty-one, Hector forty-seven. The Valenti men were inching their way older with each generation, but did that mean Kyle could expect to never see sixty?

He was mulling over that particularly chilling possibility as he came out of the hospital after an unpleasantly long shift. He didn’t register for a moment that there was someone leaning against his car as he walked over to it, and it took him another couple of moments to pause and try to figure out if he recognised them. They were small, wearing skinny jeans and a black sweater with the hood up, and as Kyle stood there blinking stupidly, they straightened and pulled the hood back.

Rosa Ortecho.

Kyle was honestly too tired to even care, so he started walking again to get within speaking distance of her. “Are you waiting for me?” 

“No, I picked your car out by mistake,” she said, sarcastic as ever. “You’re hella late, dude.”

“Yeah.” He was not going to give excuses to the older sister of his high school ex. “Any reason you’re waiting for me?”

“Sure is.” She gave him a narrow-eyed smile. “Let’s go for a ride, little brother.”

Kyle blinked. “What.”

“Oh my God, should I drive?” Rosa raised an eyebrow and looked him up and down. “You know driving sleep-deprived is actually worse than driving drunk, right?”

“I…know that, yeah.”

“Ugh, just gimme your keys.” She held out a hand, and Kyle found himself getting his keys out of his pocket and placing them in her palm. “Get in, loser.”

“We’re going shopping?” he mumbled as he went round to the passenger side door.

Rosa snorted, getting in and adjusting the seat and mirrors before turning the engine over. “Something like that. Kinda regretting cornering you this late now, I thought you’d be more alert than this.”

“Yeah, I saved all that for the actual work, and now I’m. Well.” Kyle gestured tiredly to himself, and Rosa kissed her teeth.

“Mm, yeah. This won’t be anywhere near as fun and dramatic if you’re falling asleep through it.” She was a good driver, Kyle noted. Checked her mirrors and blind spots, indicated every time she should, all of that. And thankfully, she didn’t try to engage him in any further conversation. She drove him back to his condo and gave him a pitying look as he climbed out, only staggering a little bit. 

“Keys,” he muttered, patting his pockets, and Rosa appeared beside him with his keys in her hand. “Oh, thanks.”

“You are so out of it right now,” she said, shaking her head. “You got a calendar on your phone?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you use it?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Gimme.” She gestured expectantly, and he opened his phone and gave it to her, blinking slowly as she opened it and did…something. He couldn’t see the screen to see, and it didn’t seem particularly important right now. “Okay.” She handed it back to him. “Go get some sleep, Doc. You’re making me wanna yawn just looking at you.”

“Yeah.” He waved a hand towards the car, almost dropping his phone. “Thanks for…”

“Don’t worry about it.” She turned around and started to walk away. “See you soon.”

Kyle woke up the next morning a bit weirded out by having such a realistic dream. But honestly, surgeries running late did that to him. He hadn’t even left the theatre till gone midnight, and he had an afternoon shift to get ready for later on, so he needed to get a move on. He went for a run before checking his calendar to double check his shift time, and nearly dropped his phone when he saw an event just called ROSA scheduled at seven on his next free morning – Thursday, two days’ time.

“Well, shit.” The event location was written as ‘here’, which Kyle realised after a moment must mean his apartment. 

He couldn’t remember if Rosa had said anything last night. If it hadn’t been for the event in his calendar, he definitely wouldn’t have thought she’d been there at all. She’d driven him home, and he’d given her his keys. And his phone. 

He didn’t have any way of getting in contact with her before Thursday, and no time to go and track her down in person. This morning off was the only time he had to himself before Thursday, a fact that Rosa would have known, looking at his calendar. And now the event was in there, there was a sense of inevitability about it that meant that he was just whiling away the time for Rosa to arrive on his doorstep. 

He didn’t even have the time or energy to read any more of his dad’s books in the intervening days, though the thought did occur to him as he fell into bed on Wednesday night that that hadn’t stopped him before. It was as if Rosa had pressed pause somewhere in his brain, and compelled him to listen the same way she’d compelled him to hand over his car keys and phone. He was feeling pretty compelled to be chill about it too, come to that. It was weird. But not enough to be alarmed about, according to his hindbrain.

Thursday came, and Kyle got up early enough to have a nice, long run and a long shower afterwards, and a second cup of coffee before a knock on the door came at five past ten. Rosa walked in before Kyle could take more than a step forward, and gave him a thin smile. “Hey, Doc.”

“I feel like I’ve been kidnapped,” he said bluntly. “What the hell is going on?”

“Do you remember anything at all from Monday?”

“Not really.”

She made a face. “You definitely weren’t safe to drive, dude.”

“Probably not.” He frowned at her. “Why are you waiting outside my work and coming over to my house?”

“Let’s call it quality time.” Rosa looked him up and down, then came to sit at the breakfast bar and grabbed a banana from his fruit bowl. “Alex told me you two found a demesne under Jim Valenti’s hunting cabin.”

Kyle sat down slowly. “I don’t see what that has to do with you.”

“He said you took all Jim’s notebooks.” Rosa cracked the banana open and peeled it without looking, frowning at him. “Haven’t you read them?”

“How the hell do you know about the notebooks?”

“He told me. And showed me, a couple times.” She took a bite of banana, one eyebrow raised like she was waiting for him to catch up.

Very suddenly, he did. _R_ – R for Rosa.

“You’re Rosa,” he said, blinking. “I mean, you’re R. You’re his daughter?”

Rosa waggled her fingers and swallowed her mouthful. “Hi. And your big sister. Half-sister, if you wanna get technical.”

Rosa was a year or so older than Kyle, which meant Jim had slept with her mother while he and Michelle were trying to have children too. “I can’t remember your mom’s name,” he said, filing that horrible knowledge away for later. 

“Helena.” Rosa’s nose wrinkled when she said it, like the name left a bad taste in her mouth. Which made sense when Kyle remembered everything Liz had told him about her. He’d thought when they were dating that Helena sounded like an absolute nightmare to live with, and Liz was just being Liz when she insisted in finding pure motivations for everything she did, even when it was stuff like forgetting to do stuff with her or stealing money from her purse.

It had put Kyle’s own complaints about having two cops for parents in perspective. At least his mother didn’t steal from him.

“Were they together?” he asked, while Rosa made her way through the banana. “Like, in a relationship?”

“She thought so.” Rosa’s lip curled. “Typical Helena drama. She thought he was the love of her life. Obviously it didn’t really work out that way.”

“How long have you known?” Kyle asked, staring at her in a whole new light. She was his _sister_. It was a hell of a thing to try and wrap his head around.

“Since about senior year.” Rosa finished the banana and laid the skin down on the counter. “I followed my mom to an NA meeting and heard her blubbering about Jim. And, y’know, stuff kinda made sense after that. You know Jim picked me up for a bunch of stuff in high school? But he never did anything about it. I just thought he was being soft.”

“Were you ever gonna tell me?”

She softened for the first time, hesitation appearing for the first time in the set of her mouth. “I thought about it a few times, over the years. And a lot, after Jim died. But I was in a bad place when I found out, and if you’ll remember, you were dating my baby sister at the time, and you were also a total douche. So I wasn’t exactly thrilled at getting you as a bonus family member.”

That was fair. Harsh, but fair. Kyle boxed away his hurt and nodded, getting up to put the banana peel in the trash. “You want a coffee?”

“You got any tea?”

“Yeah.” Kyle opened a cupboard. “I got, uh, mint, camomile, and lemon and ginger.”

“I did not take you for a tea drinker,” she said, amused, and he looked over his shoulder at her.

“I’m not an asshole seventeen-year-old anymore.”

“Sure.” She rolled her eyes. “Mint’s good.”

He got the box down and put a teabag in a mug for himself as well, figuring he’d probably had enough coffee for the morning. “So,” he said, setting water to boil before turning around and leaning against the counter. “My dad knew about you the whole time. You found out in senior year. Did you tell him you knew, or…?”

“Yeah, in one of my next arrests.” She smiled, a little fondly. “Pretty sure I asked him if he was going easy on me because we were related. He nearly crashed the car.”

Kyle didn’t really know how to respond to that. “So you’ve known since your senior year, and he knew you knew since then too. And you…what? Did you hang out?”

“Not so much then.” Rosa leaned her elbows on the counter. “Like I said, I wasn’t in a great place. He helped though. He couldn’t help much with getting me clean, but he helped me manage it better.”

“With magic?”

“Yep.” She gave him a smirk. “I’ve got a lot of spice. And I hated my mom, and my dad doesn’t have the touch at all. Him and Liz, they’re the normal ones. I inherited all the bad shit from both sides.” She rolled her eyes. “Pretty typical luck for me. But Jim knew his shit, and even back then, I appreciated that. He didn’t baby me or sugar-coat it.”

“He taught you.” Kyle turned around to pour the water into the mugs, breathing through another stab of hurt, and grief too this time. Jim had taught Rosa, taken her under his wing and mentored her. And Kyle had found out about all this through complete chance. “Did you work together on this stuff?”

“Only a little bit.” Rosa wasn’t smiling when he turned around and put her tea down in front of her. “I wanted to do things my own way. Like I said, I only saw his books a couple times. We talked though. Not like, a lot, because everyone would’ve been all ‘what the fuck’ if he’d started hanging out with a girl my age, and neither of us really wanted to spread shit about how I was actually his kid, but y’know, we’d meet up sometimes, or leave each other messages. He taught me to dreamwalk, so we used that a few times, but dreamwalking’s pretty useless for actual conversations.”

Kyle had read Jim’s complaints about that in the margins of a potion book, and his attempts to modify his recipe for inducing a dreamwalking state so that he would actually remember the dreams, and retain a clearer head during them.

“Right.” He leaned against the opposite counter again, hands in his pockets. “He happen to mention why he never wanted to tell me about any of this?”

“Yeah. I thought he wrote about it too, but.” She shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe not, I don’t know. He told me your mom didn’t approve of spice, so he was happy to kinda leave it alone while you were a kid, and not involve you at all. And then after that, he latched onto this theory that your whole bloodline was cursed. Our bloodline, I guess. Took him ages to admit that to me, like he thought I’d be pissed at him.” She rolled her eyes. “And since you’d never shown any spark like some kids do, he figured it was safest to just keep the whole thing under wraps and let you grow up without all this shit.”

“All this shit,” Kyle repeated flatly.

“Yeah, you know.” She shrugged again. “All this magic stuff. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. And it turns out we really do have serious spice when it comes to curses, and he thought that ended up turning back on you if you used it.”

“Hence none of my forefathers living past fifty-five?”

Rosa’s eyebrows shot up. “Whoa, seriously? Damn, he never said that, he just said _died young_ , no specifics.”

“None of them ever got to meet their grandchildren.” Kyle took a deep breath. “Someone should’ve told me.”

“He thought you were better off not knowing.”

Kyle looked away, shaking his head. After five years, he was used to this part of grieving, and it was very fresh after reading Jim’s notes. All the wishes that things could have been different, all the regrets for things that had gone unsaid on both sides. He’d twisted himself up in knots about it for a good couple of years after Jim’s death, but he had a bit more distance now. Enough to know that there was no point in dwellings on maybes.

“Do you think it was his decision to make?” He asked, turning back to Rosa, who narrowed her eyes. “It’s my life. My…my legacy, if he’s right about this curse being hereditary.”

“He thought it was only hereditary if you used it,” Rosa explained. “So he figured he was keeping you safe by keeping you out of it. And y’know, he was your dad. It kinda was his decision to make.”

“When I was a kid, maybe. Don’t you think you had a right to know about who your real dad was?”

“Well okay first of all.” Rosa held up a finger. “I don’t reaaaaally think of him as my dad, more like an uncle. He donated the genes, but my dad is my dad. Like, my papa is the guy who raised me, so he gets dibs on the dad title. Second.” She shrugged. “Sure, you’ve got a point. But it’s happened the way it has, and that’s how it is. I was actually gonna ask if I could read Jim’s notebooks, because there’s a lot I could get out of them. Practically, I mean. Like, I’m an actual practicing witch over here, there’s material in there I could seriously get some use out of.”

“Okay, well that’s kinda dismissive.”

“Yeah, it was meant to be.” She gave him a smile that had far too many teeth in it. “True though.”

Kyle sighed and picked up his mug. “If you _can_ read them, go for it.”

Her smile dropped. “What do you mean?”

“They’re in code.” Kyle’s lips twisted. “There’s like, fragments of English in them, but not much. He made normal notes in some of the published books he bought, so I’ve been reading those. Getting context for everything before I try and decode his actual writing.”

“Shit.” Rosa frowned. “Can I see?”

“Sure.”

He put his mug down and went to grab a notebook at random, handing it to Rosa at the counter. She opened it and made a quiet sound of interest. “You know,” she said slowly, “I bet this is just a substitution code.”

“Huh?”

“Like, each symbol corresponds to a letter of the English alphabet. I used to make them up all the time when I was a kid.” She tucked her hair behind her ears and tapped her fingernails against the countertop. “Do you have a pen and some paper?”

Kyle got both and pulled up a seat to sit next to her, drinking his tea while Rosa wrote out symbol-words and guessed at which letter corresponded to each symbol. “What’s the most common letter in the English language?” she muttered as she wrote.

“E?” Kyle guessed, and was rewarded with Rosa’s lips twitching.

“Yep. Then T, then O, I, and N. I think S comes next, but those are the important ones. And then you get double L’s and double O’s.”

“So you look for the most commonly occurring symbols,” Kyle realised, leaning closer. “I get it.”

Rosa cracked the code in just a few minutes. “Not exactly secure,” she snorted, tapping her pen on the paper. “Pretty sure that’s it though. _Using tobacco in an anti-addiction pouch seems counter-intuitive but actually worked well,_ ” she read. “ _I’ll still try angelica root next. As always, never enough native plant information._ He’s got that right.”

“What do you mean?” Kyle asked, transfixed by the words on the page. His dad’s words, right there. And Rosa had provided the key to decoding them.

“Well, it’s history and colonialism and stupid biases,” Rosa shrugged. “It’s always better to use whatever’s growing around you, for like, multiple reasons. But if you’re starting out, a lot of traditional correspondence charts and ingredient lists will tell you to stock up on a lot of these European plants, or over-harvested plants. But if you really wanna work with the powers around you, you wanna work with what’s in your back yard. If you’re trying to communicate with local spirits, it’s kinda dumb to invoke them using plants from a whole other continent, y’know?”

Kyle absolutely did not know, but he nodded anyway. “Makes sense.”

Rosa straightened and flicked her hair over her shoulder to give him an appraising look. “You really wanna get into this? Like, actually involved?”

“What counts as involved?” Kyle looked over at the couch, where the bags with Jim’s notebooks were. “I haven’t _done_ anything yet.”

“Do you want to though?” Rosa tilted her head. “Cause if you do, I could help. Actually be a big sister. Y’know, if that wouldn’t be too weird.”

Kyle had always wanted a sibling. He and Alex had pretended so often that they were brothers when they were little, and Kyle had gone back and forth on whether he would have preferred a brother or a sister dozens of times. He’d figured out eventually that he was going to be an only child for life, and gotten over it, but apparently there had always been a little part of him deep down that still wished for a sibling.

Rosa Ortecho was absolutely not the sister he’d imagined, but he found himself nodding. “I’d like that. I always wanted to be a brother.”

She laughed, but not cruelly. They finished their tea and went over to the couch together, and Kyle didn’t end up reading the book he’d started earlier that week. He watched and listened to Rosa instead, as she transcribed and read the first notebook with wide eyes, laughing occasionally, explaining things more often.

It was the experience he’d wanted with his dad. And it wasn’t exactly the same – Rosa wasn’t Jim – but it was so much nicer than trying to read the notebooks alone had been.

Kyle had to go in for an afternoon shift, and in a moment of what he could already tell was extremely intentional tact, Rosa said she’d leave the notebooks and come back in the evening when he did, so they could keep going through them together.

Rosa brought her own notebook on her third visit, and on the fourth, Kyle went to her apartment instead of her coming to his. She lived on the second floor of an ugly apartment block, but she’d made the inside of it beautiful. He was learning things about her, like that all the addiction-breaking and sobriety spells Jim had started brainstorming had been intended for her, not himself, and that she’d been clean for three and a half years.

“Only eight relapses,” she said dryly. “I’m aiming to keep it below double digits, but I’m not even thirty, so we’ll see how that goes.”

She had a very dark sense of humour. She was bipolar, and took medication for it. She did yoga and meditated too, while complaining about rich white ladies who did yoga and meditated. She and Liz called each other at least once a week. She had an Etsy store where she sold her art, mostly unsuccessfully because she was bad at marketing herself.

“It feels dumb,” she complained. “Bigging myself up like I’m some big deal. They’re just drawings, y’know?”

She loved good food. She was bisexual. She carried a power pack around with her because she was always letting her phone die. She’d been focusing on developing her divination skills, mainly scrying and pendulum work, but now she’d taken a hard left into ancestor work, and Kyle was being pulled along with her.

He cast his first spell under her guidance. Just a little thing, to test his own abilities. A candle spell for focus before what he knew would be a long day in the theatre.

He had a message from Rosa waiting for him when he got changed out of his scrubs after that shift.

 **From: Rosa Ortecho [15:12]**  
How’d it go?

 **To: Rosa Ortecho [18:36]**  
SO WELL. 

She’d said he could go over hers after if he wanted, and he evaded his friends and took her up on it, both excited and a little frightened.

“Is this like a high?” he asked Rosa almost as soon as he was through the door. “Because I feel super buzzed, and y’know, I know everyone says magic’s not addictive, but I can see people getting addicted to this!”

“Calm down, dude,” Rosa said dryly. “You’ve cast one spell, you’re not exactly a magician.”

“But I could be!” Kyle gestured, a little frantic. “I actually could be! And I just…is this insane? I never even – I used to think magic was for cheats, y’know? I thought it was a scam, and I never had…” He gestured again, both hands waving erratically. “I never sparked out like you, or like Maria DeLuca. Could anyone do this? Or has this always been like, a potential thing I’ve carried around with me all my life?”

“Ohhh-kay.” Rosa beckoned him over and pulled a couple of cushions off her couch, dropping them on the floor and dropping herself on top of one, crossing her legs easily. “Come and sit down, hyper boy.”

“I’m not hyper,” Kyle protested, and immediately paused. “Wait, am I?”

“You’re kinda hyper,” Rosa nodded, clearly amused. “C’mon. Sit.”

So he sat, and Rosa guided him through a very gentle grounding, which she admitted sheepishly afterwards that she should’ve showed him earlier. “I forget that it’s technically a basic,” she said, shrugging and sort of laughing. “I didn’t do it till Jim told me to. Before that, I was – I mean, like you actually. I’d cast a spell and just go wild. Which, y’know, in hindsight? Definitely got mixed up with my manic episodes.”

Kyle got up, feeling much calmer now, and much hungrier too. “Yeah? Do you want pizza or something by the way? My treat.”

“Your treat, definitely.” Rosa waved a hand and grinned, and laughed when Kyle started to stretch. For someone who did yoga almost every day, she was still very comfortable taking the piss out of him for his workout routine. “But yeah, I’d like, have a huge burst of energy and cast a bunch of spells at once and then either wild out and go do something stupid, or crash and cry myself to sleep three nights in a row.”

“Is it true you slashed Joey Garcia’s tyres that time?” Kyle asked, touching his toes.

Rosa snickered. “Hell yeah. That asshole had it coming, he made Maria cry.”

A sudden thought occurred to him and Kyle straightened so fast he almost lost his balance. “Was it you who stole my hubcaps the summer I graduated?”

Rosa burst out laughing, falling sideways out of sheer glee. “Nope,” she crowed. “But I wish I had, you were _such_ a little shit, hitting Alex at your dumbass prom. And I do know who did.” She looked so smug Kyle grabbed the cushion he’d been sitting on and threw it at her, making her laugh harder.

“Who?”

“Well I guess since you’re paying for pizza, I can be generous.” She grinned. “Michael Guerin stole your hubcaps.”

Kyle stared at her. “Michael Guerin? What the hell? Why?”

“No idea, Alex told me.” She got up and stretched too, arms reaching up to the ceiling, going up on tiptoes. “Mmmmmm. I thought it was real funny though.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Kyle rolled his eyes and got his phone out. “We Come In Pizza okay?”

“Yeah, get me a twelve-inch extra-hot Flying Flamio.” Rosa rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck.

After he’d ordered and they were both sitting at her tiny kitchen/dining table, Rosa lit some incense and got them each a glass of water. “That stuff you were saying before, about not sparking out as a kid?” she said, sitting opposite him. “It’s kinda like art, or music. Some kids doodle or sing because they can’t _not,_ y’know? It’s like that for me and my art, and with my craft.” She shrugged, nimble fingers braiding her long hair back. “I’ve always been drawn to express myself in those ways. But you can teach anyone to draw, and you can teach anyone to use their own spice. Everyone’s got some.”

“So anyone could be a witch? Or practitioner,” Kyle added hastily. A lot of people still didn’t like ‘witch’ as a label, even if it had been reclaimed. Rosa snorted though, not offended.

“You can call me a witch dude, relax. And yeah, you can be a witch too, and so can anyone if they just put in the work. It’s like anything, it’s like a muscle. You gotta use it to get good at it. And like, same as anything, some people have a natural talent for it, but in the end, the time and effort you put into it is what matters. There’s a reason why so many people call it the capital-W Work, y’know?”

“Do they?”

“Oof.” Rosa shook her head. “Yeah, baby brother. God, I keep forgetting how new you are to this.”

Kyle rolled his eyes. “Yeah, don’t rub it in.”

“You still wanna keep going?” Rosa asked, eyebrows raised. “Cause Jim’s notebooks go on and on about how Valentis using magic is what gets them their early deaths.”

Kyle shrugged helplessly. “I wanna at least finish reading his notebooks with you. And this, y’know.” He gestured to her. “I like having a sister. I’m still getting to know you.”

“Ew, you sap.” Rosa kicked him under the table, but she looked pleased. He didn’t know her well enough yet, but Kyle suspected at least part of her tough-guy attitude was an act, and Rosa secretly had a soft, gooey centre waiting to be discovered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Magister Officiorum_ by Julio Cesar Ody, _The Long-Hidden Friend_ by John George Hohman, and _Psychic Self-Defence: A Study in Occult Pathology and Criminality_ by Dion Fortune are real books that you can read if you so wish! _Ancestral Veneration in Practice_ is based on _Honoring Your Ancestors: A Guide to Ancestral Veneration_ by Mallorie Vaudoise.


	3. Chapter 3

“What’s perfect power exchange?” Kyle asked.

They were sitting at his kitchen counter, Rosa on the corner with her feet thrown up on the stool between them, twirling a pen round her fingers while she read the notebook she was on. At this point both of them were fairly good at reading Jim’s code, but Kyle still had to ask about various concepts he’d never heard of.

“Ugh.” Rosa pulled a face, eyes rolling dramatically to the ceiling. “It’s really dumb. I knew you were gonna get to that bit soon.”

Kyle flicked her knee. “Whatever, what is it?”

She swung her legs off the stool and sat up properly, lip still curled in disdain. “It’s a theory. It’s like – okay, so power exchange, have you heard of that yet?”

“Uhhh.” Kyle really felt like he was back in school sometimes with this stuff, or on the ward being picked on by a particularly gruelling doctor. “Like a bargain with something?”

“Yeah, exactly.” Rosa pointed her pen at him. “So a normal power exchange is where you enter into a relationship with an outside entity for the express purpose of a tit for tat power swap. So like, say you wanted a boost, and you decide to get it from a tree, or a mountain or something.” She tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, gesturing emphatically. “You’d do things like protect that mountain, you’d get involved with the ecology of it, you’d spend your time with it, you’d defend it from outsiders, all of that.”

“You date the mountain,” Kyle summarised, and Rosa snorted. 

“Kinda, I guess. I’ve actually heard you do get godwives and godhusbands in Voudun, and nuns are always getting called brides of God, but that is not the point.” She waved her hands, getting herself back on track. “Anyway, in exchange for this – well, devotion, or service, the mountain would gift you power beyond your normal abilities. And in theory, this can get to really miracle-level stuff, like control over the weather, and control over animals, and all that.”

“Okay.” Kyle frowned. “That’s – I mean, it’s a theory, right? No one’s actually controlling the weather out here, are they?”

“Aren’t they?” Rosa raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know. But yeah, some of the really flashy powers, they’re either stories, or people literally don’t know how to get them anymore. No one’s going round with a pack of wolves, shooting lightning bolts from their hands these days.”

Kyle had doubts they’d ever been anything but stories, but Rosa had a much more accepting view of these things. “Alright, so that’s power exchange. What’s perfect power exchange?”

And the disdain was back. “Perfect power exchange is impossible, and stupid, and makes literally no sense.” Rosa shook her head. “It’s basically the idea that you can get these incredible powers without entering into a bargain with another entity. You’re pulling it from…” She waved her hands, snorting. “The universe, or the world, or whatever. Not a specific thing or place. It’s a total crackpot theory, and honestly kinda embarrassing that Jim wrote about it like it could be a possibility, because it can’t. Like, the power has to come from somewhere.” She smacked her hands together. “Basic laws of the universe. You can’t get something from nothing. You can’t shoot fire from your hands without that fire coming from somewhere. You can’t…I don’t know, heal with a touch, and not pay a price for that.”

Kyle frowned down at his dad’s writing. He’d definitely written about it in a musing sort of tone, definitely not in the way someone would treat an impossible theory. “Healing with a touch. Like Jesus?”

“Yeah.” Rosa sat up straighter, nodding. “Yeah, actually that’s a good example.”

“Of perfect power exchange?”

“No, of like, an example of the sort of powers you could theoretically get _with_ a power exchange.”

“But Jesus wasn’t making bargains with mountains,” Kyle frowned.

“No,” Rosa said slowly, in the voice that meant she thought he was being incredibly thick. “But he was the _son_ of someone kinda important.”

“That’s not a bargain though!” Kyle protested. “That’s inherited!”

Rosa laughed. “Sure. But that’s kinda my point – Jesus probably was some kind of witch, but the deity he was connected to was definitely God. There’s, uh, a lot of back and forth over that, with the whole Jews verses Christians thing, because Jesus’ God was the Jewish God, but if you’re Christian now, you’re not worshipping that same God, but that is.” She shook her head again and made a calming gesture. “So not the point. For me, God and Jesus are about faith, not about craft, so I don’t really think about them in those terms. But if you still go with the idea that Jesus’ powers were the way they were because he was a demigod.” She rolled her eyes. “Then you can apply that thinking to figures like Achilles and Perseus too.”

“And none of that is perfect power exchange.”

“No. Even the _name_ ‘perfect power exchange’ makes no sense.” Rosa reached over and tapped Jim’s notebook. “It’s not perfect, and it’s not even an exchange, because you’re not giving anything in exchange for what you’re getting.”

“How’s it not perfect?”

“Because it’s impossible. Also, from a spiritual point of view, I’d call it parasitic, not perfect.” Rosa wrinkled her nose. “There’s no relationship. It’s just taking. It’s a really selfish idea, even if it was possible. Which, again, it isn’t. This is the level of flat earth theory here.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s disappointing that he was even willing to give it this amount of attention.”

“Alright, lay off the guy, he’s dead.” Kyle threw a protein bar wrapper at her. “And this was in…” He checked. “1993. He’s like, thirty-three years old.” It wasn’t quite the winning move he’d hoped.

“More than old enough to know better,” Rosa said, hamming up the patronising tone. “His work on trying to figure out his own limits when it comes to what looks like the inherent destructive quality of his spice though? _That’s_ interesting.”

That was a subject Jim returned to again and again over the years. It was still pretty far beyond Kyle’s understanding, but Rosa was good at dumbing it down for him. 

“This is interesting,” she said a while later, frowning over the notebook she was reading. “And sad.”

Kyle rubbed his eyes. “What? What year are you on now?”

“Uh…” She checked. “2013. Halcyon days, huh? But listen to this – _Manes men have their own protection, and the risks that come with meddling with that are high. But A is being hurt, and it makes me sick to think of J doing that to his own son. Nothing mundane I can do to stop him or even deter him. If anyone’s bound here, it’s me._ A is Alex, right? And J is…?”

“Jesse.” Kyle had actual chills, and not the good kind. “Jesus. Alex said my dad tried to intervene, but I didn’t realise it was…what the hell does that mean, _Manes men have their own protection_?”

Rosa shook her head. “I don’t know. Alex had the style, but he never had the spice. I thought his family was as straight-laced as they come.”

“They are. I mean, his dad definitely is.” Kyle remembered what Alex had said about Jesse beating him up in front of his brothers, and hated himself for adding bullying onto Alex’s list of problems at that age. 

“Yeah, he hated Alex dressing like he did,” Rosa agreed, frowning. “Hm. Jim and Manes were friends though, right?”

“Yeah. Till he died.” Jesse hadn’t spoken at the funeral, Kyle remembered, but he’d put that down to grief, and Jesse’s taciturn nature. “Keep reading,” he suggested. “Maybe Dad will actually be clear about what he means at some point.”

Rosa snorted, but did go back to reading, making notes as she went in her own spiral-bound notebook. For his part, Kyle tried to read faster. He hadn’t realised he was still in the nineties while Rosa had leapt forward into the next decade already.

The conspiracy emerged slowly, in bits and pieces Rosa had to put together like a badly-made jigsaw. Jim had been paranoid about writing down what was technically classified information, but as his relationship with Jesse grew more and more fractious, he seemed to care less and less.

So Kyle and Rosa got to find out that the military apparently had top-secret covens, one of which Jesse had been a member of. A coven project that had been running since the 1950’s, with the aim of discovering the process for perfect power exchange. (Rosa had needed to go and scream into a pillow at the stupidity of the American military-industrial complex after that revelation.) The project had been shut down for good in 2009, but Jesse had pursued it privately, and kept Jim looped in. As local sheriff, he’d been made aware of the Air Force coven’s existence in an official capacity. As Jesse’s friend since childhood, he’d known far more than he officially should have.

Jesse was convinced that perfect power exchange was not only possible, but that there were people who had already figured it out. Cults and secret orders and old family enclaves might not know what they had, but Jesse would when he saw it. It was an obsession.

Jim had been using his particularly strong cursing abilities for Jesse for years, turning them on people Jesse had told him needed to be ‘redirected’, and adding his power to Jesse’s for other spells too, mainly scrying and location spells. Jesse was convinced that there were people with extraordinary levels of power living right under their noses in Roswell, and had tried his best to hunt them down, only to fail over and over, getting Jim to ruin multiple lives in the process.

Jim had finally put his foot down just before his death. Jesse had gotten suspicious about a local man called Noah Bracken, and he’d apparently had his eye on Michael Guerin for years. He wanted both men under lock and key, and he wanted Jim to help him bring them in. It would be completely illegal, and at that point Jim wasn’t even a sheriff anymore, and he suspected Jesse was the reason for it. He’d said no.

“It’s addressed to me,” Rosa said as she turned over the last page, stunned. “Dear Rosa.”

“Read it,” Kyle urged. They were sat on her floor, their own piecemeal notes scattered around and loosely grouped. 

“Dear Rosa.” Rosa cleared her throat. “If you’re reading this, I expect I’m either missing or dead. Jesse knows far more about my abilities than I ever expected, and he’s an expert at turning people’s own powers against them. Couple that with our family’s tendency to die early for whatever reason, and I don’t fancy my chances. He was always more powerful than he liked to let on. I know your heart is in Roswell with your papa, but if you do ever leave, get far away from the Manes men. If Kyle ever comes back to settle here, look out for him. I wish you two had been able to grow up together. I should have let you. Keep him safe, and look out for yourself too. I love you both so much.”

She was crying by the end, and Kyle felt like someone was standing on his chest. He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, and Rosa reached up to cover his hand with her own. Only a month ago, he would have said that it was impossible to give another person brain cancer, but now he wasn’t anywhere near so sure. It still sounded impossible, given what he knew about the limits of what magic could do, but if the cancer had already been there, undetected, and Jesse had somehow tipped it over the edge, somehow accelerated it to the point where any kind of treatment would be useless…

Knowing what he knew about Jesse Manes now, Kyle knew he was capable of it. The man held grudges in tight fists. He’d been laying curses and getting Jim to lay curses against people for years. One of his arguments for Jim targeting Michael Guerin had been that the man should be dead by now from all the malevolent energy Jesse had directed his way. Why he’d been focusing so hard on Guerin was never explained, but it was pretty fucking chilling to realise an adult man had set his sights on destroying the life of a teenager. 

That was the kind of man Jesse Manes was. And it was awful to realise that not only was Jim Valenti the kind of man who would cheat on his wife with another woman while they were trying to have a baby together, and keep his child from that illicit relationship a secret from everyone in his life, but Jim Valenti was also apparently the kind of man who would allow his friend to cajole and persuade him into cursing multiple innocent people.

Jim had taken Jesse at his word when he’d said they weren’t innocent, but his suspicions had been growing for years before he finally put his foot down.

“Some code,” Kyle said finally, hollow. “Protect children at all costs, protect the community, serve with honour. Big words.”

Rosa sniffed. “Shut up.”

“What?” Kyle leaned away to look at her properly. “What?! He…Jesus, Rosa, look at what he did! He was a villain in this fucked up story!”

“I am not talking to you about this right now.” Rosa stood up and wiped her face, staining her fingertips black. “Go away and come back when you can accept that people are really complicated, and nothing is simple, and he might’ve done some bad stuff, but he did some really good stuff too.”

“Fine.” Kyle felt like he kind of needed to eat an entire pizza and have a bit of a cry on his own too, so that suited him fine. 

“It’s not that I don’t get that people are complicated,” he told the guy behind the counter at We Come In Pizza as he waited for his order to be completed. “I get that people are complicated. Everyone’s got some, some rich emotional life going on and we don’t know about it. Like, you only see ten percent of what a person is dealing with at any given time, right?”

The guy blinked. “Right.”

“Right!” Kyle waved a hand at him. “But like, there’s a difference between being complicated, and then like, being complicit in cursing people’s houses to burn down. There’s nothing complicated about that! And you know what? The worst thing isn’t even that he did those things. It’s the hypocrisy. Hypocrites are the worst, y’know?”

Another blink. “…sure.”

Kyle nodded. “I used to be a real hypocrite sometimes. Say one thing, do another, and that’s just…it’s not right! And that’s the issue; it’s not that he did all this stuff, it’s that he was doing all this stuff and keeping it a secret while pretending he was this stand-up guy with this super strict moral code. The code! How many times did he talk about his freaking code? And it just makes you feel like a sucker for falling for it. Because it was totally an act.” Kyle scrubbed his face with both hands. “You can’t say you have integrity and then go against your own code like that. You can’t have it both ways.”

The guy behind the counter nodded slowly, and turned to take a box from the man working in the kitchen. “Here’s your pizza, dude. Have a good night.”

“Yeah.” Kyle picked up the box and sighed. “Thanks, man.”

Rosa had assured him that Alex knew nothing about the shady shit his dad had been getting up to over the years, and Kyle believed her, but all he wanted to do right now was talk about this absolute nightmare with someone who wasn’t related to him. Telling Alex all of this without Rosa’s consent would be a huge dick move though, so he was stuck with going home alone with his pizza and eating his feelings instead. 

And to be fair, he did feel much better with a full stomach.

Rosa held out on telling Alex the full story, but once she and Kyle had both calmed down enough to be in the same room and not have an argument about morality and hypocrisy, she did tell Alex that it had been her in the photo he and Kyle had found in the cabin’s secret bunker, and she and Kyle would quite like to come over and try to connect with Jim’s spirit in his demesne. 

Alex looked practically chipper when he gave them a key at Bean Me Up on his way to somewhere. “Can’t believe you didn’t wanna do it on Halloween,” he said, highly amused. “If you’d been just a week earlier…”

“Actually.” Rosa grinned at him in the manner of someone about to lay down an ace. “If you’re calculating it properly as a solar holiday in the Celtic tradition, Samhain was this morning. It’s gotta be exactly halfway between the autumn equinox and winter solstice.”

Kyle narrowed his eyes at her. “Are we doing it today on purpose? Did you plan this?”

“Is it chance or is it destiny?” she said breezily, while Alex snorted. “Besides, do I look like a Celtic witch? Come on, Doc, finish your coffee and let’s get moving.”

They’d brought some supplies – candles and herbs and food and drink. Rosa exclaimed over the ugliness of the cabin and absolutely lost it at having to climb down a ladder into Jim’s demesne. “This is _so cool!_ ” She practically shouted, spinning around. “Holy shit, dude. This is _so_ cool! I can’t believe he never brought me here, this is awesome!”

“It’s like something out of a fairytale, right?” Kyle said, watching amusedly as she ran her fingertips along the workbenches and bookshelves, now emptied of books.

“Yeah,” Rosa breathed. “God, who knew Jim had it in him to be so dedicated to the aesthetic?”

“I think it’s more like he didn’t care.”

“Yeah, but that clearly paid off.” Rosa gestured to the rough walls and glass jars and bottles Kyle hadn’t touched. “It’s a real demesne. I didn’t really believe you when you said so, I thought it’d just be a shitty basement.”

“I think it was designed to be a fallout bunker,” Kyle said. “A really tiny one.”

“Wouldn’t wanna be stuck down here when the bomb drops,” Rosa snorted. “Alright, you wanna get things set up?”

“Yeah.” 

They moved around each other and got candles and incense lit (positioned directly under the open hatch so that the little bunker wouldn’t fill up with smoke), and offering bowls set up at the points of the compass. Kyle had had a little more practice with these things now, having done them with Rosa a few times. He still hadn’t cast any spells on his own yet, but he’d started thinking about it. He’d read a lot by now though about how much better and safer it was to have a mentor or a fellow practitioner to cast with, and he was happy to continue working with Rosa.

Kyle poured water into the bowls, and they each pricked their fingers and added a drop of blood to each one too. Rosa invoked God and the spirits of the land, and Kyle drew symbols for each in the dirt floor, wondering how many times his dad had done the same. They sat opposite each other with Jim’s final notebook and the key to Rosa’s baby chest between them, and a small white candle with his name carved into it.

“And this definitely isn’t a summoning?” Kyle asked, only a little nervous. He knew horror movies weren’t representational of real witchcraft at all now, but that didn’t mean he could completely put those images out of his mind.

“Even if it was, it wouldn’t be scary,” Rosa said, unimpressed. “Summoning can be respectful too, like an invitation. Which is what this is. We’re inviting our bloodline ancestors to pay us a visit and see if they have anything to say. And if they have anything they want us to say.”

“We’re not expecting disembodied voices or anything, right?”

“You watched way too many dumb movies as a kid.” Rosa shook her head. “It’s a feeling. Like feeling a presence in the room. You’ll know it when you feel it, and I’ll know it if you don’t.”

Another advantage of having a mentor.

They lit the candle and held hands, and he and Rosa spoke together, him only tripping a little bit over the words. “James Hector Valenti. Your children Rosa and Kyle call you to this place. Thomas Victor Valenti. Your grandchildren Rosa and Kyle call you to this place. Hector Valenti, your great-grandchildren Rosa and Kyle call you to this place. Forefathers and foremothers, ancestors, honoured dead, we call you to this place.”

They’d decided going three generations back was far enough, and sat in silence, both looking at the candle flame, since Rosa had said that was likely where they would see a sign of any visiting spirits. It burned steadily, and Kyle blinked at what felt like a very slow pace. He was able to recognise the feeling of his power rising now, or his spice warming up, as Rosa called it.

It was centred at the crown of his head and back a bit, on what felt like the highest part of his skull. It made him feel sort of suspended and floaty and pleasantly calm, as if everything had meaning and no mistakes could be made because nothing would happen that wasn’t meant to happen. 

He became aware, in a slow sort of way, of someone nearby, just out of his eyeline. It wasn’t frightening. “Can you see something?” he asked Rosa, who smiled.

“No, but I can feel him. Just over to my left.”

“My right,” Kyle agreed. 

“Don’t look,” she told him. “Let’s just wait.”

The candle flame flickered, then strengthened and seemed to hover in place as though time had slowed down around it. “It’s normal,” Rosa said before he could ask, and Kyle grinned sheepishly.

“Okay.”

“I almost never let him hug me,” she said suddenly. “I just remembered a time I did, out of nowhere. I think it’s him.”

Kyle longed for a memory like that to jump spontaneously into his brain, but nothing came. He began to inhale deeper though, frowning. “Can you smell something?”

Rosa breathed deeply and smiled. “His aftershave.”

“Yeah. God.” Kyle had to swallow around a lump in his throat. It wasn’t just his aftershave – it was his laundry detergent and everything else. He had home videos, so he wasn’t at risk of forgetting the sound of his dad’s voice, but there was still no way of preserving the way someone smelled. 

The presence stayed, and was joined by others too. Not as strong, but definitely there, and all male. Kyle wanted to ask Rosa if it felt odd, to be the only woman included in this strangely male-centric family legacy, but didn’t quite dare break the silence. He would ask afterwards, he decided, and inhaled another lungful of his dad’s scent, trying to memorise it.

“Honoured dead,” Rosa said, smiling a little. “You’re welcome here with us. Jim, since I’m pretty sure you’re here.” She cleared her throat, looking somewhere over Kyle’s shoulder. “I still miss you. I wish you’d told me about whatever the hell was going on with Jesse Manes. I’m actually really glad Kyle found your place down here.”

“I miss you too,” Kyle said quietly, still looking down at the candle flame. “I…shit. I miss you. I don’t even know what else to say.”

Jim’s presence seemed to grow closer, and grow in strength, and Kyle got the feeling of comfort like from a hug, only without the hug. “Hi,” he whispered. “Shit, Dad? Is that seriously you?”

“It’s him,” Rosa said, totally sure. “I can tell.”

“You’ve done this before?” He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought to ask her before.

“Not with this side of the family.” Rosa smiled slightly. “I kinda…I don’t know, I never really felt connected to any of it beyond Jim, and like I said, I always thought of him more of an uncle. No offence,” she added to the empty air. “But yeah, you definitely feel like my brother now, so I do feel that connection.”

Kyle’s throat thickened again, and he barely managed to smile before Rosa was laughing. “You’re such a sap, God.”

“Shut up, I like having you as my sister too.” Kyle grinned at her, and Jim’s presence around them grew so strong that Kyle could feel the outside blooming of pride that wasn’t his, a totally separate happiness at the two of them having found each other. The other presences grew too, and Kyle wished that Thomas hadn’t died so young; that he’d had a chance to know his grandfather at all.

It was a relief too to feel that however young Jim had died, however bad that death had been, he was peaceful now. 

The candle was burning low before Rosa squeezed Kyle’s hands and lifted her chin. “Jim. And others too, if you have any input on this. What would you have us do about Jesse Manes? Your final letter to me made it sound like he murdered you. I know this is kind of a long shot, but if you have any opinion on that, or any guidance, now’s the time.”

Kyle fought the urge to look around. He couldn’t really feel any outside emotional response to that, but Rosa made a sound suddenly, and when he followed her gaze to look back at the candle flame, he saw it burning blue. “What’s that mean?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” Rosa muttered, sounding annoyed. “Come on, guys, something a little clearer please.”

_Run._

Kyle almost pulled his hands from Rosa’s, he wrenched himself around so fast. “Dad!”

“He’s not there.” Rosa dragged his hands to her, digging her nails in. “Hey! Kyle!” Kyle looked back at her, tears in his eyes.

“I heard him, I heard him right there, right behind me!”

“So did I. Kyle.” Rosa squeezed his hands. “Chill out, okay? You heard it in your head, not with your ears.”

“That…what, like an auditory hallucination?”

“Yeah, except it wasn’t a hallucination.” Rosa rolled her eyes, and looked back at the candle. “Okay Jim, _run_ is pretty dramatic, but I’m assuming that means you want us to stay away from him.”

There was definitely a strong rush of affirmative feelings there, and not just from Jim – the other Valenti men wanted them to stay away from Jesse Manes too. They just wanted them to live, and live long, full lives.

That was the feeling that lingered a little as the white candle burned down, and when the smoke from it dissipated, so did the spirits that had visited them.

A ritual didn’t just end there though. After waiting a few minutes to ground their energy, Kyle followed Rosa’s lead and they both stood up. They poured water onto the ground over the symbols Kyle had drawn and spoke farewells to the air. They extinguished the other candles and the incense, and shared half a loaf of bread and butter before heading upstairs. Rosa played some music Kyle didn’t recognise at all on the drive back to Roswell, and he slept deeper that night than he could remember sleeping for a long time.

“I don’t want to stay away from Jesse Manes.”

Rosa looked up with an unholy gleam in her eyes. “Oh thank God you said it first, I wanna hunt him down with torches.”

Kyle had to laugh, rocking back on Rosa’s couch and shaking his head. “Alright, slow down.” It had only been a couple of weeks since they’d summoned the various Valenti spirits, and it felt like it had been a dream. But Kyle was slightly haunted by not-hearing his dad’s voice coming from right behind him, saying _run_. It was kind of intense.

“We need to be careful,” he said, and sighed when Rosa rolled her eyes.

“Don’t be such a baby. This guy potentially murdered our father. We oughta take him out!”

Kyle held up a hand. “Appreciate the vengeful enthusiasm, but I’m actually super not down for murder.”

“Manes men have their own protection,” Rosa quoted at him instantly. “We can’t come at this like Jim did, we gotta be smarter.”

Kyle nodded. “Yeah, okay. In that case, I think it’s past time we talked to Alex.”

“Our Manes man on the inside?” Rosa raised an eyebrow. 

“You don’t wanna tell him?”

“It’s not that.” Rosa pursed her lips, shifting where she was sat on the floor on a cushion. “And it’s not like I’m worried about Alex ratting us out. But if we are going to seriously target his dad, how’s he gonna feel about that? Would he ask us not to?”

“Alex hates his dad.”

“I hate my mom.” Rosa shrugged. “Family is complicated. You’re right though, we should tell him. It’s just _how._ Like, what’s the etiquette for that? Take him out for coffee, tell him we’re pretty sure his dad killed our dad?”

“If anyone could take news like that without freaking out, it’s Alex,” Kyle said, and Rosa snorted.

“Yeah, true. Alright, we’ll tell Alex, soon. Then what, if he’s on board?”

“He might have ideas.” Kyle thought about it. “I think one of us would need to like…I don’t know, go to Jesse as a friend, or an ally. Say we found one of my dad’s notebooks, one of the ones that puts Jesse in a good light. Whoever does it makes out like they’re just looking for info on this part of their dad’s life they didn’t know existed, and neither of us actually did know that Jesse Manes was into this stuff too.”

Rosa nodded slowly. “Big fan of how this goes right in the face of what Jim told us. I’ve literally never met a parent I couldn’t disobey and disappoint.”

“On the upside,” Kyle said, “you haven’t yet met a sibling who didn’t think you were the coolest, so.”

Rosa’s grin was very pleased. “Mm, true. Speaking of, actually, we should probably tell Liz too. And I wanna be able to see her face when I do it, because how many people get to tell their sister that her high school boyfriend is their brother? I should film it.”

“You’re a cruel woman,” Kyle said, cheerfully resigned. “Can I be there?”

“Hell yeah! We could hold off till Christmas, right? She’ll definitely come home for that. And I know it sounds dumb to say, but there’s no rush on this vengeance thing.” She gave him a significant look. “Jesse Manes isn’t exactly living life on the edge. We can take our time and make sure we do this right. Serve that dish ice-cold.”

“I want confirmation he actually did something before we commit to the vengeance thing,” Kyle said quickly. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

Rosa rolled her eyes. “Whatever, fine. He deserves to suffer anyway.”

“That’s not really for us to decide.”

“If not us, who?” Rosa demanded, lightning fast. “You think the law is gonna punish him for all the things he’s done? Sometimes the universe works in mysterious ways, through mysterious conduits, and sometimes we are those conduits. Even if he didn’t kill Jim, he still cursed literally dozens of people, and he still treated Alex like absolute shit.”

“I don’t care.” Kyle leaned forward. “I am not playing judge, jury, and executioner. This isn’t going to be some vigilante quest. I just wanna know the truth.”

“And if it turns out that Jesse Manes did murder your dad?” Rosa asked, meeting his eyes dead on.

Kyle took a deep breath. “Then I’ll think about that when it comes.”

Rosa seemed to accept that, nodding slowly. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

Kyle didn’t know how his dad would have felt about his children attempting to avenge his murder, but he didn’t feel guilty about going against his wishes in trying to at least find out the truth. He knew Jesse Manes was dangerous, and he already knew that if they went with his plan, he was the logical choice to get close to him, taking Jim’s place and pretending to take up his mantle.

The difference between him and his dad was that he wouldn’t be alone. He would have Rosa at his side every step of the way, and possibly Alex, and maybe Liz as well. He’d have a team behind him. Better than that – he’d have a family.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me on [tumblr!](https://myrmidryad.tumblr.com)


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